But his good mood turned gray again as he read the text. It seemed to relate to a struggle—a civil or maybe a religious war of some kind, he thought—being raged on a group of islands. As he read on, the bearded man was identified as the emir of the Caliphate, Mullah Ibn Abbas, and the island of Java was mentioned three times as the location of the most violent clashes.

That simply could not be. There was no “Caliphate,” and Java itself had been wrested from Dutch control more than two months ago. It was now part of the empire. Chagrined, Hidaka squeezed his eyes shut, then returned to the article.

There were detailed accounts of bitter street fighting between Indonesian marines and elements of the Indonesian army that had defected to Caliphate forces. Something called suicide bombers were reported to have breached the marines’ command center and killed many senior officers, gravely disrupting the secularist defenses.

Hidaka felt as if he had picked up some sort of trashy American novel—this had to be fiction. What were Indonesians? Or secularists? Or Caliphates? Or suicide bombers? What sort of crazy man, given the alternative, would fly his plane into the enemy rather than just bombing them? A desperate one perhaps, he conjectured, but crazy nonetheless.

At the bottom of the absurd story, beneath the words Related Links, sat four lines of blue text, underlined as he had seen before. Perhaps touching them might reveal more? Unfortunately he doubted his fingers were small enough to pick out an individual line. So he took a pencil out of his shirt pocket and tried that.

It worked! The spirits of his ancestors were smiling on him now.

He touched the line that had intrigued him as soon as he read it. America warns China.

The screen changed instantly, just as before. And just as before, the result was absurdly perplexing.

The U.S. secretary of state, a woman calling herself Jamie Garcia, had warned Chinese Premier Hu Dazhao that the gravest consequences would flow from any Chinese incursion into the Exclusion Zone around Java. She pledged that something called a “UN-mandated Multinational Force” would ensure the safety of ethnic Chinese refugees from something else called a “jihad.” And she warned China that any further expansionist moves on its part anywhere in Southeast Asia would be severely challenged.